Gay Cowboys?

People are already complaining about Brokeback Mountain, the Ang Lee adaptation of Pulitzer Prize winning authors E. Anne Proulx novella about two cowboys who meet up in the wilds of Wyoming in 1963 and begin a 20 year love affair. Called by many "the gay western", the film promises to pull no punch, as in nudity and explicit gay sex.

Now, while the script bounced around Hollywood for years, it wasn’t until Lee -who helmed another gay themed film, the delightful Wedding Banquet -took interest in it, that it finally went ahead. Casting Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal as the two cowboys, Ang Lee is quick to point out that the film and even its stars see it more as a love story between two men who really don’t understand how this all began.

"He’s always battling his genetic structure, " Ledger said of his character of Ennis Del Mar. "He was battling the traditions and morals and fears and beliefs that have been passed down to him, and they’ve been imbedded in him so deeply, he couldn’t get past them."

Of course, this is what many gay men and women have gone through for generations. And if you live in one of those red states, the hatred of ones self is driven in even more.

This movie also takes on the mystique of the cowboy. The illusions created by Hollywood and novelist such as Louis L’Amour and Zane Grey about the cowboys of the 19th Century have been fully ingrained in the minds of American’s. The white hat cowboy was good, ethical and always macho. And the girls swooned. Even the bad cowboys were portrayed as macho, and even then the girls -who liked the bad boy - would swoon.

And while no one complained much about Clint Eastwood’s 1992 Oscar winning film Unforgiven, which took on those classic oaters and blurred the line between heroes and villains and man and mythology, Brokeback Mountain is drawing some ire from folks in Wyoming, the state in which it is set (and also, coincidently, where three teenagers murdered gay student Matthew Shepard years ago).

Playwright and life-long Wyomingite Sandy Dixon told the Casper Star Tribune she’s never met a gay cowboy (that she knows of, really. Never heard of Gay Rodeos?) and feels that Hollywood should not portray the state of Wyoming with gay cowboys. "Don't try and take what we had, which was wonderful -- the cowboys that settled the state and made it what it was -- don't ruin that image just to sell a book." She added, "There's nothing better than plain old cowboys and the plain old history without embellishing it to suit everyone." Regarding the reaction of Wyoming people to the film, Dixon said it depends on the viewer: "Those that want to make a queer story out of it, they will, and those that know real cowboys will say it's all hogwash."

Of course, this is typical rhetoric from closed minded people. And the people of the state were not too pleased with Proulx’s short story collection Close Range anyways, when it was published in 1999. The writer explained to the newspaper this past spring "that when a writer places deviant characters in a setting people love, the writer will get a lot of flak. But as a historian and an observer, she said she writes what she sees. "It is dysfunction that attracts me," she said."

The film won the Golden Lion, the top prize at the Venice Film Festival earlier this fall, and it was reported that there was not a dry eye in the house after a screening at the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado. The film is also garnering a lot of Oscar buzz. Still, New York Daily News critic Jack Mathews predicts the gay cowboy movie may be "too much for red-state audiences, but it gives the liberal-leaning Academy a great chance to stick its thumb in conservatives' eyes."

But Matthews maybe right. It will be an Art House film, playing in major cities and will never get out to ‘burbs and the megaplex’s that show four screens of latest crapfest starring Vin Diesel. It will play in some red states, but expect it to be a bi-coastal player with Chicago maybe being the only big city in the Midwest to report significant grosses.

And while Brokeback Mountain (which opens December 9) could be a pipe dream that shows the world that gay people are your brothers, sisters, father, mothers and everything in between, it could also reignite the hate that conservatives already have for people like me and my fellow gay humans.